Consul is very simple to install. It is a single Go binary that acts as a client and as well as a server. You can include Consul by provisioning VMs or bare metal servers. We will use the Consul Helm chart to show the installation process in a Kubernetes environment. 

In this chapter, you will learn how to install the Consul agent in a VM and look at the Consul installation procedure in a Kubernetes cluster. The Consul service mesh is very easy to form in a Kubernetes environment using the Consul Connect feature, which enables automatic injection of the sidecar proxy for existing and new applications. However, it is slightly more complex to build the service mesh in a VM or bare-metal environments for Consul.

In a nutshell, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Installing Consul in a VM
• Installing Consul in Kubernetes